Microsoft has embraced Zero Trust principles—both in the way we secure our own enterprise environment and for our customers. We’ve been helping thousands of organizations worldwide transition to a Zero Trust security model, including many United States government agencies. In this blog, we’ll preview the new guidance and share how it helps United States government agencies and their partners implement their Zero Trust strategies. We’ll also share the Microsoft Zero Trust platform and relevant solutions that help meet CISA’s Zero Trust requirements, and close with two examples of real-world deployments.

CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model

Use this guidance to help meet the goals for ZTMM functions and make progress through maturity stages.

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Microsoft supports CISA’s Zero Trust Maturity Model

CISA’s Zero Trust Maturity Model provides detailed guidance for organizations to evaluate their current security posture and identify necessary changes for transitioning to more modernized federal cybersecurity.

The CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model includes five pillars that represent protection areas for Zero Trust:

1. Identity: An identity refers to an attribute or set of attributes that uniquely describes an agency user or entity, including non-person entities.
2. Devices: A device refers to any asset (including its hardware, software, and firmware) that can connect to a network, including servers, desktop and laptop machines, printers, mobile phones, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, networking equipment, and more.
3. Networks: A network refers to an open communications medium including typical channels such as agency internal networks, wireless networks, and the internet as well as other potential channels such as cellular and application-level channels used to transport messages.
4. Applications and workloads: Applications and workloads include agency systems, computer programs, and services that execute on-premises, on mobile devices, and in cloud environments.
5. Data: Data includes all structured and unstructured files and fragments that reside or have resided in federal systems, devices, networks, applications, databases, infrastructure, and backups (including on-premises and virtual environments) as well as the associated metadata.

The model also integrates capabilities that span across all pillars, to enhance cross-function interoperability—including visibility and analytics, automation and orchestration, and governance. The model further includes the four maturity stages of the Zero Trust Maturity Model:

• Traditional: The starting point for many government organizations, where assessment and identification of gaps helps determine security priorities.
• Initial: Organizations will have begun implementing automation in areas such as attribute assignment, lifecycle management, and initial cross-pillar solutions including integration of external systems, least privilege strategies, and aggregated visibility.
• Advanced: Organizations have progressed further along the maturity journey including centralized identity management and integrated policy enforcement across all pillars. Organizations build towards enterprise-wide visibility including near real time risk and posture assessments.
• Optimal: Organizations have fully automated lifecycle management implementing dynamic just-enough access (JEA) with just-in-time (JIT) controls for access to organization resources. Organizations implement continuous monitoring with centralized visibility. 

Microsoft’s Zero Trust Maturity Model guidance serves as a reference for how government organizations should address key aspects of pillar-specific functions for each pillar, across each stage of implementation maturity, using Microsoft cloud services. Microsoft product teams and security architects supporting government organizations worked in close partnership to provide succinct, actionable guidance that aligns with the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model and is organized by pillar, function, and maturity stage, with product guidance including linked references.

The guidance focuses on features available now (including public preview) in Microsoft commercial clouds. As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, Microsoft will continue to innovate to meet the needs of our government customers. We’ve already launched more features aligned to the principles of Zero Trust—including Microsoft Security Exposure Management (MSEM) and more. Look for updates and announcements in the Microsoft Security Blog and check Microsoft Learn for Zero Trust guidance for Government customers to stay up to date with the latest information.

Microsoft’s Zero Trust platform

Microsoft is proud to be recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report.¹ The Microsoft Zero Trust platform is a modern security architecture that emphasizes proactive, integrated, and automated security measures. Microsoft 365 E5 combines best-in-class productivity apps with advanced security capabilities and innovations for government customers that include certificate-based authentication in the cloud, Conditional Access authentication strength, cross-tenant access settings, FIDO2 provisioning APIs, Azure Virtual Desktop support for passwordless authentication, and device-bound passkeys. Microsoft 365 is a comprehensive and extensible Zero Trust platform that spans hybrid cloud, multicloud, and multiplatform environments, delivering a rapid modernization path for organizations.

Microsoft cloud services that support the five pillars of the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model include:

Microsoft Entra ID is an integrated multicloud identity and access management solution and identity provider that helps achieve capabilities in the identity pillar. It is tightly integrated with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR services to provide a comprehensive suite of Zero Trust capabilities including strict identity verification, enforcing least privilege, and adaptive risk-based access control. Built for cloud-scale, Microsoft Entra ID handles billions of authentications every day. Establishing it as your organization’s Zero Trust identity provider lets you configure, enforce, and monitor adaptive Zero Trust access policies in a single location. Conditional Access is the Zero Trust authorization engine for Microsoft Entra ID, enabling dynamic, adaptive, fine-grained, risk-based, access policies for any workload.

Microsoft Intune is a multiplatform endpoint and application management suite for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, and Android devices. Its configuration policies manage devices and applications. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint helps organizations prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced cyberthreats on devices. Microsoft Intune and Defender for Endpoint work together to enforce security policies, assess device health, vulnerability exposure, risk level, and configuration compliance status. Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint help achieve capabilities in the device pillar.

GitHub is a cloud-based platform where you can store, share, and work together with others to write code. GitHub Advanced Security includes features that help organizations improve and maintain code by providing code scanning, secret scanning, security checks, and dependency review throughout the deployment pipeline. Microsoft Entra Workload ID helps organizations use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) with GitHub Actions. GitHub and Azure DevOps are essential to the applications and workloads pillar.

Microsoft Purview aligns to the data pillar activities, with a range of solutions for unified data security, data governance, and risk and compliance management. Microsoft Purview Information Protection lets you define and label sensitive information types. Auto-labeling within Microsoft 365 clients ensures data is appropriately labeled and protected. Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention integrates with Microsoft 365 services and apps, and Microsoft Defender XDR components to detect and prevent data loss.

Azure networking services include a range of software-defined network resources that can be used to provide networking capabilities for connectivity, application protection, application delivery, and network monitoring. Azure networking resources like Microsoft Azure Firewall Premium, Azure DDoS Protection, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, Azure API Management, Azure Virtual Network, and network security groups, all work together to provide routing, segmentation, and visibility into your network. Azure networking services and network segmentation architectures are essential to the network pillar.

Microsoft Defender XDR plays key roles across multiple pillars, critical to both the automation and orchestration and visibility and analytics cross-cutting capabilities. It is a unified pre-breach and post-breach enterprise defense suite that natively coordinates detection, prevention, investigation, and response actions. It correlates millions of signals across endpoints, identities, email, and applications to automatically disrupt cyberattacks. Microsoft Defender XDR’s automated investigation and response and Microsoft Sentinel playbooks are used to complete security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) activities.

Microsoft Sentinel is essential to both automation and orchestration and visibility and analytics cross-cutting capabilities, along with any activities requiring SIEM integration. It is a cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) you deploy in Azure. Microsoft Sentinel operates at cloud scale to accelerate security response and save time by automating common tasks and streamlining investigations with incident insights. Built-in data connectors make it easy to ingest security logs from Microsoft 365, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Entra ID, Azure, non-Microsoft clouds, and on-premises infrastructure.

Real-world pilots and implementations utilizing Microsoft guidance

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) implements multifaceted solution for phishing-resistance initiative—In this customer story, the USDA implements phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA)—which is important aspect of the identity pillar of the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model. By selecting Microsoft Entra ID, the USDA was able to scale these capabilities to enforce phishing-resistant authentication with Microsoft Entra Conditional Access for their four main enterprise services—Windows desktop logon, Microsoft M365, VPN, single sign-on (SSO). By integrating their centralized WebSSO platform with Microsoft Entra ID and piloting more than 600 internal applications, the USDA incrementally and rapidly deployed the capability to support the applications and services relevant to most users. Read more about their experience making incremental improvements towards stronger phishing resistance with Microsoft Entra ID.

The United States Navy collaborates with Microsoft on CISA Zero Trust implementation—In this customer story, the United States Navy was able to utilize Zero Trust activity-level guidance to meet or exceed the Department of Defense (DoD) Zero Trust requirements with Microsoft Cloud services. And now with Microsoft guidance tailored for the United States government agencies, the aim is to help civilian agencies and their industry partners to do the same—meeting the CISA ZTMM recommendations at each maturity stage with Microsoft Cloud services. Together with Microsoft, the Navy developed an integrated model of security to help meet their ZT implementation goals. Read more about their collaboration with Microsoft.

Access Microsoft guidance for the United States Government customers and their partners. Embrace proactive and proven security with Zero Trust.

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To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023, Carlos Rivera and Heath Mullins, September 19^th, 2023.

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AI systems are increasingly used in critical areas such as healthcare, finance, and defense. Consumers must have confidence that the AI systems powering these important domains are secure from adversarial manipulation. For instance, one of the recommendations from Gartner’s Top 5 Priorities for Managing AI Risk Within Gartner’s MOST Framework published in Jan 2021¹ is that organizations “Adopt specific AI security measures against adversarial attacks to ensure resistance and resilience,” noting that “By 2024, organizations that implement dedicated AI risk management controls will successfully avoid negative AI outcomes twice as often as those that do not.”

However, performing security assessments of production AI systems is nontrivial. Microsoft surveyed 28 organizations, spanning Fortune 500 companies, governments, non-profits, and small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), to understand the current processes in place to secure AI systems. We found that 25 out of 28 businesses indicated they don’t have the right tools in place to secure their AI systems and that security professionals are looking for specific guidance in this space.

This tool was born out of our own need to assess Microsoft’s AI systems for vulnerabilities with the goal of proactively securing AI services, in accordance with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles and Responsible AI Strategy in Engineering (RAISE) initiative. Counterfit started as a corpus of attack scripts written specifically to target individual AI models, and then morphed into a generic automation tool to attack multiple AI systems at scale.

Today, we routinely use Counterfit as part of our AI red team operations. We have found it helpful to automate techniques in MITRE’s Adversarial ML Threat Matrix and replay them against Microsoft’s own production AI services to proactively scan for AI-specific vulnerabilities. Counterfit is also being piloted in the AI development phase to catch vulnerabilities in AI systems before they hit production.

To ensure that Counterfit addresses a broader set of security professionals’ needs, we engaged with a diverse profile of partners spanning large organizations, SMBs, and governmental organizations to test the tool against their ML models in their environments.

“AI is increasingly used in industry; it is vital to look ahead to securing this technology particularly to understand where feature space attacks can be realized in the problem space. The release of open-source tools from an organization such as Microsoft for security practitioners to evaluate the security of AI systems is both welcome and a clear indication that the industry is taking this problem seriously.”

—Matilda Rhode, Senior Cybersecurity Researcher, Airbus

Three key ways Counterfit is flexible

As a result of internal and external engagements, Counterfit is flexible in three key ways:

1. Counterfit is environment agnostic—it can help assess AI models hosted in any cloud environment, on-premises, or on the edge.
2. Counterfit is model agnostic—the tool abstracts the internal workings of their AI models so that security professionals can focus on security assessment.
3. Counterfit strives to be data agnostic—it works on AI models using text, images, or generic input.

Under the hood, Counterfit is a command-line tool that provides a generic automation layer for adversarial AI frameworks such as Adversarial Robustness Toolbox and TextAttack. Our tool makes published attack algorithms accessible to the security community and helps to provide an extensible interface from which to build, manage, and launch attacks on AI models.

Designed for security professionals

Counterfit uses workflows and terminology similar to popular offensive tools that security professionals are already familiar with, such as Metasploit or PowerShell Empyre. Security professionals can benefit from the tool in the following ways:

• Penetration testing and red teaming AI systems: The tool comes preloaded with published attack algorithms that can be used to bootstrap red team operations to evade and steal AI models. Since attacking AI systems also involves elements of traditional exploitation, security professionals can use the target interface and built-in cmd2 scripting engine to hook into Counterfit from existing offensive tools. Additionally, the target interface can allow for granular control over network traffic. We recommend using Counterfit alongside Adversarial ML Threat Matrix, which is an ATT&CK style framework released by MITRE and Microsoft for security analysts to orient to threats against AI systems.

• Vulnerability scanning for AI systems: The tool can help scan AI models using published attack algorithms. Security professionals can use the defaults, set random parameters, or customize them for broad vulnerability coverage of an AI model. Organizations with multiple models in their AI system can use Counterfit’s built-in automation to scan at scale. Optionally, Counterfit enables organizations to scan AI systems with relevant attacks any number of times to create baselines. Running this system regularly, as vulnerabilities are addressed, also helps to measure ongoing progress toward securing AI systems.
• Logging for AI systems: Counterfit also provides logging to record the attacks against a target model. Telemetry may help data science and engineering teams improve their understanding of failure modes in their AI systems.

This tool is part of broader efforts at Microsoft to empower engineers to securely develop and deploy AI systems. We recommend using it alongside the following resources:

• For security analysts to orient to threats against AI systems, Microsoft, in collaboration with MITRE, released an ATT&CK style Adversarial ML Threat Matrix complete with case studies of attacks on production ML systems.
• For security incident responders, we released our own bug bar to systematically triage attacks on ML systems.
• For industry practitioners and security professionals to develop muscle in defending and attacking ML systems, we hosted a realistic Machine Learning Evasion Competition.
• For developers, we released threat modeling guidance specifically for ML systems.
• For engineers and policymakers, Microsoft, in collaboration with Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, released a taxonomy documenting various ML failure modes.

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To learn more about this effort:

• Visit the Counterfit Git Hub Repository. If you have specific needs around securing AI systems, please email us at counterfithelpline@microsoft.com.
• For a walk-through of Counterfit and live tutorial, please register for our May 10, 2021, webinar.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹Gartner, Top 5 Priorities for Managing AI Risk Within Gartner’s MOST Framework, Avivah Litan, et al., 15 January 2021.

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